Update

One-Man Development Firm Finds Sweet Spot in Educational Apps

How does Dan Russell-Pinson continue to make a living in the highly competitive App Store market? Simple, he’s a one-man shop that builds games he wants to play.

His app consistently rank among the top 200 most downloaded and highest grossing in the Apple App Store’s education category, but he doesn’t consider himself an app developer, or very good at keeping tabs on the most lucrative app markets.

Stack the States has spent years bringing in revenue and users to Russell-Pinion's firm.

Stack the States has spent years bringing in revenue and users to Russell-Pinion’s firm.

And much of it can be tied to Stack the States. Nearly four years after its release, parents and teachers are still downloading the map building game for their children and students, pushing Stack the States to the top of the heap as the most downloaded educational app in the country as recently as January 15, 2015.

That game, combined with income from his eleven other educational apps, allows the Charlotte, N.C.-based developer to create games full-time under the banner of his company, Freecloud Design, Inc. His work has received attention from several game-focused parenting blogs, and children’s tech review sites. His latest game, a sandbox-style roller coaster maker that teaches the science behind the speed, received a nod from the Washington Post as one of best news kids apps for 2015.

Russell-Pinson first started making games on an Atari 800 personal computer in the 80s, and after high school, completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science at Clemson University. But he didn’t transition into a full-time game developer of what he calls “cerebral” games until 2007, when he started making Flash games for fun in his spare time. Roughly five years and twelve educational games later, Russell-Pinson has explored a diverse range of subjects, including physics, history, math and geography.

But even as Russell-Pinson imagines a not-too-distant future where children use virtual reality tools like the Oculus Rift to fully immerse themselves in cleverly designed fusions of education and entertainment, he still says it was that blinking cursor that was an invitation to create, a blank-slate challenging you actively develop instead of passively absorb.

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This transcript has been edited for time and clarity:

gamesandlearning.org: So you consider yourself a games developer and not an app developer. Why?

Dan Russell-Pinson: I guess I’ve noticed a big difference between people who make just apps, like time-management apps for example, and someone who make games that are also apps. I was at an app developer conference recently, and after a couple days I realized that most of what they talked about doesn’t apply to me at all. They worry about lots of little things that I never do. It’s almost as if we’re working on totally different things. So even though we deal with similar issues, like coding or provisional profiles for our apps, the craft is totally different, like apples and oranges. I realized it’s probably better for me to engage with groups purely within game development groups instead of app development.

gamesandlearning.org: Why didn’t you begin making educational games right after college?

Dan Russell-Pinson: I think the main reason I didn’t pursue it was there were so many games produced by large companies, and that just didn’t interest me. I sort of look back at the Atari days, all the games I enjoyed were made by one person. And they had a lot more personality.

It was more interesting to see what one person came up with, whereas a bigger company has lots of financial pressures, they make decisions based on consensus and committee and they choose the games they want to make based on their potential profit and so forth. It doesn’t mean they made a bad game, it’s just different. I didn’t necessarily look at game companies and go, “Wow, I want to be a part of that!” because a lot of times you just end being the guy who draws backgrounds all day or creates sprites all day [laughs].

gamesandlearning.org: You’ve released three games in the last two years, along with multiple versions and updates. What does that mean, workload-wise, as the only developer?

Dan Russell-Pinson: It’s as much work as you want to make it, is one answer. You can put out one app per year or you can put out four apps per year. It’s up to you to decide how much you want to take on. It’s a lot of work because I have a corporation that I’m running here.

It’s work just to make the company function. And there’s making the game, but you also have to market it and support customers. But motivation has never been a problem for me. Not just to make money, but to make a mark on the world in some way or make something valued by people. But the biggest challenge is wearing all those different hats when I’d rather just create things all day and put them on a conveyor belt to the public. But of course you have to do really boring things like updating apps. Maybe the iPhone 6 Plus has some obscure bug that causes your app to do something weird and you have to spend half a day tracking it down and fixing it. Marketing, for me, is particularly interesting or fun, but you do your best to find a way to exist in the market.

gamesandlearning.org: So for the fun stuff, the creative aspect of game development, do you try and wrap a gameplay mechanic — like motion controls on a tablet or phone — around a subject like physics, or is it this other way around? Or do you do something different altogether?

Dan Russell-Pinson: Well, some people are in this business to make money. They take market research and say, “What kind of apps make more money?” I’m not particularly pure in that sense either. I want to make money as well, but as I’ve become more successful that’s less of an issue. Sometimes I start with something I want to teach and make a game out of it, and sometimes I just want to make a game of a certain type, and I try to find a way to put education in it. Like in the case with Off the Rails, I really just wanted to make a game where something, like a ball, follows a track in real-time. It didn’t start out as a roller coaster, it started out as a marble on a path that you draw, and the idea was to draw the track in such a way that the marble would stay on the path.

gamesandlearning.org: How do you approach balance in an educational game? When you’re designing a game, how do think about the challenge of designing a fun game while also effectively teaching a core concept?

Dan Russell-Pinson: Some of the earliest educational apps kind of looked like PowerPoint presentations. They asked you to do something and if you did it right it said, “Good job!” So if your game’s not interesting, people won’t stick around to get anything out of them. And if it’s too entertaining, they’re not learning anything anyway. Ultimately an app is no good if nobody plays it. So that’s the kind of landscape I’m trying to operate in.

The educational aspect should really take center stage, and the entertainment should be just enough to keep you engaged. In a perfect world, the game mechanics themselves should teach you something.

One of my previous games, Presidents vs. Aliens, is an example of how this isn’t done very well.

" The game has an educational component and an entertainment component, but they’re totally separate. You’re asked a question about a president, and if you’re correct you fling the president at the alien and possibly knock them down. So the education and the entertainment are completely isolated from each other."

“You’re asked a question about a president, and if you’re correct you fling the president at the alien and possibly knock them down. So the education and the entertainment are completely isolated from each other.”

But in Stack the States I did a little bit better. You still have to answer questions about geography, but you have to move the state around the map and use the unique shape of Texas or Connecticut in order to position it properly. So I think that’s a better example of fusing entertainment and learning together. You have to learn something in order to play the game better.

gamesandlearning.org: Stack the States is your most successful game as far as downloads go. It still regularly ranks among the top 10 in the educational app category. Do you think its fusion of entertainment and learning aspects is part of the reason why?

Dan Russell-Pinson: Maybe. I think timing has more to do with it. It was released in 2010, which is the same year that the iPad came out, which, I think, really helped educational apps explode. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather play a game on the iPad than on a phone. And for kids I think that’s magnified.

But in the “Games” category on the App store, there’s a big churn. Most new games stay up in the top of the charts for a couple weeks and then fall, to be replaced by newer games, which, in turn, fall. But in the “Education” category it seems like that churn is less pronounced. It’s really helped me make a living. I couldn’t make a living the old way by spending 3 months making a game only to have 2 weeks in the charts. Certainly some games defy that, like Monument Valley or many others, but making one of those is much harder. Especially for a single person. So having a game consistently in the top 100, or even 200, has definitely helped me make a living.

gamesandlearning.org: Many educators are using social networks with a focus on educational content — like Edmodo — because they’re free, give teachers a platform to recommend games for the classroom and often come with assessment tools that can be easily related to Common Core standards. As a developer, is this on your radar?

Dan Russell-Pinson: I don’t think about that at all, to be honest. Not even a little. As far as having some kind of resource in my apps for teachers to track their students progress, I’ve given that some thought but haven’t done it. Mainly because teachers aren’t really my target demographic. I’m really thinking about kids in their homes, sitting on the sofa and learning about geography. Having said that, a lot of schools do use my apps. So I probably should wise up and think about what they would want.

Twenty to thirty percent of my sales are from educational institutions, and I think to myself, “How often would teachers use a functionality in my app to track student progress?” If a school used 50 different apps, would they really use 50 different teacher reporting methods? If there were an established standard, perhaps through something like Edmodo, like an API that developers could use, maybe that would make sense.

gamesandlearning.org: What’s your philosophy towards designing in-game rewards, like performance badges, and how they relate to gameplay in educational games?

Dan Russell-Pinson: I think rewards are important, but they’re important for games in general. There has to be something you want to achieve when you’re playing the game. For instance, in Stack the States, you start with an empty map of the U.S., and as you play the game you earn states, like Texas, and it will show up on the map, and serve as an indicator of your progress. So if you have a map with 10 states, and I have a map with 30, I’m farther than you. I like those kinds of rewards better than just a ‘great job” badge.

gamesandlearning.org: Like gold, silver or bronze stars awarded to players at the end of a stage?

Dan Russell-Pinson: Those seem a little bit meaningless, as opposed to earning a state in a geography game which is more interesting and can trigger further learning. “I just earned Texas, and I can see it on my map. Can I tap on it? Yes, and when I do, I get information about it.” I like that kind of reward because it keeps the educational loop going and it’s not just a token to put on a shelf. I try to put those kinds of rewards in all my games. I also try to include bonus games that reward repeated completion of a game.

gamesandlearning.org: As a developer working solo, how do you measure the effectiveness of a reward structure or how fun a gameplay mechanic is when you’re in the development process?

Dan Russell-Pinson: I generally use my own intuition and my own sense of what’s fun to play. Sometime my daughter helps me playtest towards the end of the development process. It seems to work pretty well. But I probably should use more playtesting. Looking back at my last game, Off the Rails, I probably should have playtested it with lots of kids, because I think I would have found the gameplay was difficult to pick up. [laughs] It was difficult to learn how to get going. I think I noticed some of that myself and did my best to fix that problem.

A big problem for me is just choosing what kind of project to do. It doesn’t make sense to make a MMO like World of Warcraft. You have to pick something that’s within your skillset. For instance, there’s a big market right now in apps for toddlers, the 2 – 6 year-old market. Companies like Toca Boca are a good example. But the thing about that market is the successful apps, generally speaking, are very visual, design-heavy and the programming is often not very complex.

They’re often beautiful-looking, but the programming is simple. These types of apps don’t match my skillset because I’m a better programmer than I am a designer. I don’t try to make those kinds of apps because I don’t think they’d be successful. I focus on late elementary school, early middle school and beyond because I think they value complexity and gameplay over graphics.

gamesandlearning.org: You’ve designed games that explore physics, math, history and geography. What are your development plans in the future? Do technologies like the Oculus Rift give you ideas for different types of gameplay development?

Dan Russell-Pinson: My goal is to always move forward. For example, my last two games were in 3-D. I’d never made a 3-D game until last year. But I learned how because I was interested in it: how to work with 3-D models, how to program in 3-D. It was exciting for me because I was learning something completely new. So that’s my goal, and it’s the great thing about educational apps. It still feels relatively new.

Educational video games have been around for decades — I played them when I was a kid — but something about the iPad has made them all new again. There’s still so many ideas that haven’t been done. Even though the industry has started to mature, technologies like Oculus are going to bring about new ways of playing games. Just think about it! From what I understand, I could probably get my last game, Off the Rails, working with Oculus in less than a day. Just imagine how awesome that game would be in virtual reality. But someone like me wouldn’t be interested in spending too much time on that until the technology has time to grow an audience big enough to appreciate educational games. But I definitely see myself in that space, and I won’t wait until virtual reality becomes a big market to start thinking about it.

gamesandlearning.org: Looking back, 5 years or so, to when you started making educational apps, what are some lessons you’ve learned as a developer?

Dan Russell-Pinson: I would say, make sure you make something you’d want to play. When I had the idea for Stack the States in my head, I really wanted to play that app. So I really wanted to make it as fast as possible so I could play it. I think you should be working on things that you enjoy. That sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many people don’t do that. [laughs] Some people think, “Kids like this type of game, so I’m going to go make that even though I would never play it.” You’ve got to work on something you’re interested in, otherwise how are you going to put all the finishing touches on it and put in the extra time to make it just right?

I’d also say, learn to do as many things yourself as possible, or try to find a development partner who’s in the same boat as you, to work on something together. You just have so much more freedom if you work on a game yourself. I know some people who’ve used things like Kickstarter to raise $60,000 just to work on game. But what if that game takes twice as long to develop than you thought? If you have all this financial burden and obligation, you’re not going to be as successful. You need to allow yourself to fail sometimes. If you make an app by yourself, you can afford to fail, and you don’t have financial burdens clouding your visions about what kind of app to make.

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Christopher B. Allen Christopher B. Allen is a contributing editor for gamesandlearning.org, as well as a radio producer and anchor for Montana Public Radio. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Montana, and won 1st place in the 2014 National Hearst Journalism Awards for radio broadcast. Chris is also an Air Force veteran.